SAN ANTONIO, TX – A Tilly’s executive at eTail West 2014 said that implementing mobile features such as autosuggest and product recommendations increased conversion rates on the channel as well as time spent on the site.

During the “Winning in Mobile – the Experience Secret” session, executives from Bloomreach and Tilly’s discussed how the retailer improved the mobile experience for Tilly’s customers. Since the retailer addresses a younger audience, mobile is even more important.

“Our customers early adopted into mobile technology,” said Craig DeMerit, chief operating officer of Tilly’s, Irvine, CA. “We saw that as both a challenge and opportunity to try to outperform our competitive space.

“We knew that to keep the customer focused around the experience, we needed to improve things, and year-over-year, we’ve seen a 60 percent increase in the amount of time spent on our site,” he said. “Mobile traffic tends to be an influencer, but also we need to do commerce.

“If we’re seeing the customer migrate to mobile traffic, we knew that we needed to improve conversion so year-over-year we’ve seen a 40 percent increase in conversion on mobile.”

Early adopters
Tilly’s sells apparel for the skate, surf, motocross and juniors’ demographics. The company carries more than 200 brands and has more than 190 retail stores across the United States.

Because Tilly’s attracts a younger audience, its customers tend to spend even more time on mobile.

“Teens are kind of a predictive group of consumers in that they opt-in to technology a little earlier than maybe their parents and actually influence their parents’ behavior,” Mr. DeMerit said.

According to Mr. DeMerit, more than 50 percent of Tilly’s traffic is on mobile, and the average time spent on mobile is up 60 percent year-over-year. Traffic on mobile has increased 100 percent year-over-year.

With the help of Bloomreach, Tilly’s enhanced its mobile site to achieve these higher rates of conversion and traffic.

One feature the retailer added was autosuggest so that if a customer is typing in the search box, Tilly’s will give them suggestions using predictive search technology to help reduce the amount of typing a consumer needs to do.

Another feature was recommending other related products in the “more like this” section.

Not only has Tilly’s seen higher conversion rates on mobile, but it is also seeing a higher order average on mobile compared to desktop. The average order value is up three percent, and mobile conversions are 11 percent higher than other devices, per Mr. DeMerit.

Personalization
According to Raj De Datta, CEO/co-founder of Bloomreach, Mountain View, CA, everything in mobile comes down to personalization.

Bloomreach worked with Tilly’s with a service that focuses on merchandizing properly on mobile as well as implementing cross-device personalization.

The tool also leverages predictive search and social trending to inspire the mobile user to engage further and spend more time on the site.

“Bloomreach is about processing data related products and related to what people are seeking on the Internet to pull together the perfect experience on mobile,” Mr. De Datta said.

“User experience especially in mobile is more important than ever before,” he said. “It is the device people connect with.

“If you fail to deliver on the phone, it’s the potential to have the customer go home and convert on another site or go to a different store because they had a bad experience. The content has to match the use cases of the mobile user.”

Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York